Having both of their sons forcibly conscripted into opposing armies in Burma’s seventy-five-year civil war was the final straw for fifty-two-year-old Loung Aw Sey Ya and his wife, Ba Seng Kham. For years, they and their neighbors in northern Shan State had endured airstrikes and clashes between various factions, with civilians often caught in the crossfire. “Many of our animals—cows and buffaloes—have stepped on landmines,” Aw Sey Ya recounts, adding bitterly, “When it happens, the soldiers take the dead animals for themselves.”
The war has brought multiple kinds of devastation. The currency has collapsed so badly that methamphetamine pills produced by the military are being used as money in some areas. Even with such desperate measures, food shortages and soaring inflation make it hard for most people to eat. Unable to bear the violence and deprivation any longer, Aw Sey Ya and his wife gathered their eight-year-old daughter and joined the ranks of the estimated three million Burmese who have fled to neighboring Thailand—a country whose name has come to symbolize freedom.
Most Burmese entering Thailand illegally do not qualify as refugees under the protection of the United Nations. Instead, they end up living as stateless individuals with few rights in makeshift camps, working illegally and often unable to enroll their children in Thai government schools. For parents like Aw Sey Ya and his wife, opportunities to work as farm laborers often mean leaving young children unattended and out of school. Earning as little as seven dollars a day, with work available only sporadically, many Burmese families struggle to provide even basic necessities, let alone an education for their children.
This was the challenge faced by forty-eight-year-old Sai Zam Aung. After arriving in Thailand, he discovered that his daughter did not qualify for Thai government school. Even if she had, her lack of Thai language skills would have prevented meaningful participation. Struggling to feed his family, Sai Zam Aung eventually accepted an offer from an orphanage in a non–United Nations (UN) refugee camp nearby. The orphanage provided his daughter with a place to live, food, and education in both English and Thai. Although he misses his daughter deeply, Sai Zam Aung says, “With my daughter safe, I felt relieved.” Fortunately, he works on a nearby farm and can visit her regularly.
Burmese families all over northern Thailand face this heartbreaking choice. The dormitories and boarding schools that take in these children are typically small, privately funded institutions, often supported by Christian churches from the West. While they do their best to help, they can only accommodate a fraction of the children now out of school due to the war.
Sai Vichet, himself a refugee, is the director of Koung Jor Shan Refugee Camp, a non-UN camp located in Wiang Haeng District, near the Burmese border. He speaks good English and fluent Thai and has made the education of refugee children a top priority. “We now have eighty students and eleven teachers working together in the camp,” he says. The camp offers both English and Thai classes to the children. “If they want to join Thai government schools, they have to learn Thai, and I believe English is the most important subject,” he adds. Vichet expressed a simple aspiration for the children: “We hope their future is better.”
The teachers in the camp earn a modest salary of about sixty dollars per month, but maintaining this payroll is a challenge. The camp’s funding is supplemented by a tuition fee of just twenty Thai baht per month per student—less than one dollar—but some parents cannot afford even this small amount, so the camp provides scholarships to those in need.
Another challenge is that many students do not live in the camp itself. The camp houses around three hundred people, but thousands of refugee families reside in the surrounding area. For children unable to reach the camp, the risks are significant: they are left alone and vulnerable while their parents work, with no opportunity to access education or join the Thai school system. To address this, the camp hired a bus to transport the children, but many parents cannot afford the nine dollars per month per child that the bus driver charges. Some children attempt to walk to school, but this often means traveling miles alone, sometimes in the dark, along the border—an unsafe and daunting journey. These challenges have limited the size of the student body, while countless other children remain without access to education.
Some parents in Burma are sending their children alone to Thailand to escape the war. Sai Bee, who oversees the camp’s student dormitories, explains that some newly arrived Burmese, even as old as thirteen or fourteen, may not be ready for grade one in Thai schools because of the language barrier. They often find themselves in classes with Thai children who are seven or eight years old. “But they can work really hard, and if they get good marks, they can complete two years in one year. They already know the material; they just have to relearn it in Thai. The problem is the language, not the subject,” Sai Bee said.
Sai Bee, Sai Vijit, and others in the camp then work to secure scholarships for these children to continue to high school and college. Last year, the camp successfully sent two students to Chiang Mai University—a significant victory for a small program operating with almost no funding. However, it also highlights the enormity of the problem and the limited resources available to address it.
Just outside the camp is the Bamboo Kindergarten, a school serving 115 refugee children from various ethnic minorities in Burma, including Shan, Chinese, Lisu, Pa-O, and Palaung. The children receive lunch at school, and clothing is distributed from donors, particularly during the winter when the mountain air can be frosty. The school’s main focus is to provide Thai language lessons to prepare the children for entry into Thai first grade.
The Bamboo Kindergarten’s fifty-eight-year-old director, Khru Mo Kong Sai, explains one of the school’s main challenges: “The language barrier is significant, as most of the children cannot speak Thai, and we do not speak their native languages.” This makes teaching Thai particularly difficult.
At the school, the languages of instruction are Shan and Thai. However, the children do not learn English because getting their Thai language skills to a level acceptable for entering school is already a full-time job. Unfortunately, after twenty years of support from a private aid organization, the Bamboo Kindergarten is losing its funding and will soon have to close. This highlights yet another hurdle in the education of Burmese refugee children: stability. Many of these privately funded programs operate for a time but eventually shut down due to a lack of donors.
About three hours south of the camp, in the idyllic city of Chiang Mai—often considered one of the most charming cities in Asia—eighteen-year-old Jordan, a Christian from the Karen ethnic group, enjoys playing his guitar and singing both Burmese Christian songs and American pop. He spends his days alternating between studying for the American GED exam and following updates on the war in his home country through ethnic social-media feeds.
Like so many Burmese, he also fled to Thailand, though his story is less harrowing than that of Aw Sey Ya and his family. Two years ago, when bombs began regularly falling on their village—destroying a neighbor’s home and killing him—Jordan’s parents pulled him out of high school and sent him to a private school in Yangon, the country’s largest city. His education was progressing normally until last year, when the government imposed draconian conscription rules for both boys and girls. Fearing he might be picked off the street or pulled from public transport and forced into the army, his parents managed to obtain a Burmese passport for him and arranged for him to move to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.
Jordan’s social life in Chiang Mai revolves around several Christian churches, which have long served as informal aid networks supporting Burmese refugees and internally displaced people still caught in the line of fire in Burma. He is part of a rapidly growing demographic: Burmese young people seeking refuge in Thailand to avoid conscription and complete their education.
These young people vary in their circumstances and backstories. While Jordan is fairly confident that he will achieve his dream of studying in the United States, Richard, a Karenni Catholic and former resistance fighter, has faced a much tougher path. After witnessing several boys from his village killed in combat, he decided to come to Thailand in hopes of completing his education. With no money, no passport, no visa, and no English skills, he managed to find a church-sponsored program where he can attend GED classes.
Josephine, a Malaysian Christian, teaches in a church-sponsored GED program for Burmese refugees in Chiang Mai. Her classroom is filled with children in vastly different situations—some are fully documented and supported by their families, while others have no papers, with parents who are internally displaced in Burma and unable to send money. One of her biggest challenges as a teacher is managing the wide range of academic levels among her students. Her students’ education ended when the 2021 coup took place, and the kids who were older when it happened are better off educationally. “If you finished at grade eight, you’re stuck there,” she explains.
Josephine’s fondness for her students and concern for their well-being were evident as she reflected on her work. “I think the main challenge they face in education is that they have no clear sense of direction for what they’re supposed to do with the GED. They’re taking the GED because that’s the only solution they see, but what are they going to study? Who’s going to provide the money for them to study? How are they going to translate that into a future for their families? There’s no answer to that.”
For students with no money or documentation, continuing their education seemed nearly impossible. It would be easy to lose hope, focusing on the overwhelming obstacles. Yet Josephine found perspective in her faith, realizing that those helping Burmese refugees can only do their best. “Christianity is not about macro-revolution,” she says. “When Jesus came to earth, he didn’t call for an overthrow of the Roman Empire. He said, ‘make disciples.’ Making disciples is a micro-revolution. It’s person-to-person, and that is how the gospel fundamentally brings about change.”
“I’m seeing that, [by] myself,” she adds,
I cannot end the war in Myanmar. None of us can single-handedly stop the war or send these millions of displaced people back to their homes. We are incapable of that kind of revolution. But what we can do is a micro-revolution and somehow trust the Lord that each of us working is enough to bring about His will for these people.
Josephine’s words put the struggles and efforts of students and their teachers—like Sai Bee, Sai Vijit, and Khru Mo Kong Sai—into perspective. None of them can end the war, but each is doing what he or she can. The Burmese government robbed the refugees of their homes, livelihoods, and families, and tried to strip them of their education and faith. But by studying anyway and refusing to lose hope, they lodge a small but powerful act of defiance against the junta.
